Synopsis

Mio Akishima is a second-year high school student. Unknown to her parents, she has been working as a model and actress since she was in middle school, after being scouted on the street. When an Italian cameraman berates her for her crooked teeth during a photo shoot, she decides she needs to do something about them if she wants to succeed as an actress, and begins a two-year orthodontic treatment. Attracted to her dentist, Hiroya, for not flattering, pressuring, or lecturing her, she flirts with him although she knows he has a wife and three-year-old daughter. He is from a family in which his father and brother are dentists as well, and his modern home and clinic are in the upscale Seijo district, while Mio lives, though not far away, in an old wooden house at the bottom of a hill. Her mother is deep into a new religion and, besides keeping a shrine altar that's far too big for the tiny house, has been grooming Mio to become a shrine maiden, or "muse," in God's service from the time she was five years old. Mio's father has stopped coming around, and Mio feels painfully responsible. When Hiroya invites Mio out on his cabin cruiser and they have sex, she is the one who says she wants him to tie her up . . . "I'm not looking for memories?good or bad. Painful or fond, they make no difference to me. I just live in this body from one day to the next." A brilliant exploration of female psychology through all of its nooks and crannies, and written in a unique and compelling literary style, this novella conveys with striking vividness a modern Japanese woman's experience of her body.

About the Author

Mari Akasaka(1964–) was born in Tokyo but spent her high school years in the United States before returning to Japan for college. Living abroad during those formative years seems to have instilled in her a keen sensitivity to her body and its changes, along with a uniquely contemplative linguistic sensibility. After graduation, she worked as an editor for an art magazine largely featuring erotica, and made her literary debut in 1995 when her story Kibakusha (The Detonator) was published in a literary journal. Her road novel Vibrator, about a woman who decides on the spur of the moment to travel with a long-haul truck driver after a chance meeting, was short-listed for the Akutagawa Prize in 1999; the story was later adapted into a motion picture, which won numerous awards both domestically and overseas, and it has been translated into multiple languages. The following year Myuzu (Muse) received the Noma Prize for New Writers and was again short-listed for the Akutagawa Prize. Her other works include the 1997 novella Cho no hifu no shita (Under the Butterfly's Skin), and the short-story collections Vaniyu (Vanille) of 1999 and Kare ga kanojo no onna datta koro (When He Was Her Bitch) of 2003. In 2012, her first full-length novel in nine years, Tokyo purizun (Tokyo Prison), became a major literary event, winning the universal acclaim of reviewers and critics. She is regarded as one of the standard bearers of serious literary writing in Japan today.
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